Why 74–89% of retail traders lose — the number brokers are forced to publish

At the bottom of every regulated European broker's website, in small grey text, sits the most important sentence in retail trading. It says something like: "74% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider." The exact figure varies by broker — the range across the industry runs from the low 70s to high 80s — but the sentence is always there, because since 2018 the European Securities and Markets Authority has required it to be.

Think about what that disclosure actually is. It is not a warning written by a regulator guessing at risk. It is each broker's own audited count of its own customers' outcomes, published under legal compulsion. The companies with the best data in the industry — the ones who see every trade — are telling you that roughly four out of five of their customers lose.

The number nobody's business model can survive

Now hold that number next to the industry built on top of those customers. The signal sellers, the academy founders, the lifestyle accounts posting daily profits. If their audiences win at anything like the advertised rate, the broker disclosures are impossible. Both cannot be true. One of them is audited.

This is why you will never see a loss-rate statistic in an influencer's content. Not because they don't know it — everyone in the industry knows it — but because their business model requires you not to think about it. The dream being sold is priced at $99 a month precisely because the reality is printed at the bottom of a webpage nobody scrolls to.

Reading the number honestly

Here is what the number does not say: it does not say trading is impossible. A meaningful minority of accounts are profitable, consistently, across those same disclosures. The number says trading is hard in a specific, measurable way — and decades of research into trader behavior say the hardness is not primarily intellectual.

• Losing traders don't lose because they can't read a chart. They lose because their position sizing drifts upward after losses.
• They lose because they re-enter within minutes of a stop-out, at worse prices, with more size.
• They lose because they keep trading after their edge-window closes, converting a green morning into a red day.
• They lose because the plan that existed at 9am does not survive contact with the third loss.

Every one of those failure modes is behavioral. Every one of them is also detectable — they leave signatures in your fills, your timestamps, your size progression. Which means the honest response to the loss statistic is not despair, and it is certainly not someone else's signals. It is instrumentation.

What we built instead

Fortitude starts from the disclosure the industry hides. Most people lose; the edge that remains is behavioral; behavior can be measured. The platform scores your discipline the way a risk desk would — risk consistency, revenge patterns, overtrading, equity stability — and puts the score where you cannot avoid it. No promises of profit. A promise of the truth about how you are actually trading, which is the one thing no one in this industry has ever offered you.